Pragya Kandpal is a member of the Internet 2.0 Conference’s organizing team. The conference, which will take place in 2022, will bring together some of the most influential tech experts and leaders to shine a light on technological breakthroughs, scam and fraud prevention on the internet, and the latest happenings in the realms of artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printing and augmented reality.
Protecting Your Organization Against Supply Chain Attacks: A Guide
In 2020, supply chains across the world were affected because of the COVID-19 pandemic and changing market demands. Now that the worst is behind us, we are facing yet another problem: aggressive cyber attacks by hackers.
Supply chain security of private facilities, as well as government assets, has become a major concern, given the overwhelming surge in the rate of attacks since the past year. In order to ramp up security, experts at tech conferences in the USA suggest that enterprises must establish safety protocols and embrace 24/7 monitoring technologies. Read on to know more:
What is a Supply Chain Attack?
Also known as a value attack and third-party attack, supply chain attacks involve an organization’s assets and systems getting compromised, usually through partners and service providers’ networks. Here, parties with malicious intentions gain access through weak points in the supply chain in order to disrupt operations, steal user information or siphon off financial assets.
Such attacks have increased primarily because more and more and more vendors with low-security standards are now connected to networks of organizations. Moreover, hackers now have better, more sophisticated tools to breach through systems.
Prevention Strategies
A few preventive measures can go a long way in keeping your sensitive data safe. Let’s have a look at them:
- Using honeytokens: These immediately inform you if suspicious behavior is identified in your networks. Honeytokens may appear to direct one towards valuable pieces of data but are actually useless/fake servers and other resources put in place to trick hackers. Such attacks alert the organization immediately that its systems are susceptible to security breaches. Once informed, the organization can take quick steps to safeguard/isolate critical assets or to aggressively identify the hacker.
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Educate employees and vendors: Hackers often gain access to your systems through unassuming employees and vendors who are unaware of how cyber attacks actually take place. By clicking on a scam e-mail they think was sent from a friend, they may expose critical accounts connected to the ecosystem. That is why it is extremely crucial for employees and vendors to be informed about phishing attacks, DDoS attacks, clickjacking, and ransomware threats. This can be achieved through mandatory training.
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Prepare with the belief that you will eventually have to face a supply chain attack: Data breaches are more common than you think. Therefore, cybersecurity experts at top IT conferences stress on the fact that organizations must always set up security measures by assuming that the organizations will be victims of data breaches. This will spur the implementation of aggressive and active protection strategies, keeping in mind the vulnerabilities.
Such measures include, but aren’t limited to, protecting your staff and making sure that theUSAy are aware of cyber threats, safeguarding internal processes by having fewer privileged access accounts, and bringing in layers of security to protect technology systems. The latter involves:
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Updating your antivirus software.
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Implementing multi-factor authentications.
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Investing in technologies that spot weak points in vendor systems.
These strategies are just the tip of the iceberg! To explore foolproof ways to protect your organization from supply chain attacks, register for the Internet 2.0 Conference.